The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.
BHL also serves as the literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life .

The BHL makes its metadata available for public use under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license . This Creative Commons license allows you to reuse, modify, repurpose, and distribute the metadata for all purposes including commercial and non-commercial, with no need to ask for permission.

Metadata in this case, refers to:

Library catalog records, i.e. bibliographic data, used to describe the books and journals in the BHL collection (e.g. title and author data).